The impact of a PEER funded research project "A Pacific Rim Forum on Regional-Scale Simulations of Earthquake Ground Motions and Infrastructure Response for PBEE of Transportation Systems" is highlighted below. The project Principal Investigator (PI) is David McCallen, University of Nevada, Reno. The research team includes Norman Abrahamson, University of California, Berkeley, and Floriana Petrone, University of Nevada, Reno.

The ability to realistically and accurately simulate the complex end-to-end phenomenon of earthquake processes would provide a transformational capability for the economical and safe design of transportation systems. Advanced simulations offer a pathway to evaluate phenomenon that cannot easily be experimentally observed at full-scale in the field, increasing the insight and understanding necessary to address key transportation system design issues. This workshop will provide an opportunity for PEER to engage and organize the broader PEER community in an area that is rapidly developing and evolving, with significant potential to have a positive and profound impact on performance-based earthquake engineering over the next decade.

Specific benefits of the workshop will include:

Informing the broad earthquake engineering community on the rapid developments and emerging capabilities in regional-scale simulations and the workflow and methodologies for coupling geophysics and engineering simulation models;

Deep-dive technical presentations on the most recent developments in regional-scale simulations as they pertain to engineering evaluations and PBEE (see e.g. Figure 1 and recent regional simulation model development for the San Francisco Bay Area);

Identification of remaining consensus key knowledge or computational gaps that should be addressed with priority in order for regional-scale simulations to be fully integrated into PBEE of transportation systems;

Generate discussion and follow-on interest in PEER’s research road-mapping activities to define the appropriate path for development of advanced, regional-scale simulations in PBEE practice for transportation as well as other distributed infrastructure systems.